A Psychological or Philosophical Account of People - Essay Example

The Soul Essay Dualism, as described in philosophy of mind, posits that mental phenomena can be non-physical in somerespects and that the body and mind are not identical. It covers a set of ideas about the relationship between matter and mind, and there are other positions, such as physicalism, which contrast it in the mind-body issue. Essentially, dualism is the basic observation of humans as being both matter and mind, with a certain degree of incompatibility between matter and mind. Matter is considered as inherently not aware while mind, on the other hand, is awareness (Swinburne 72). From the proponents of dualism, it follows, therefore, that mind is not capable of existing without matter and awareness cannot occur from mere matter. This observation forms the basis of Cartesian dualism. Richard Swinburne, on one side, and Paul Moser and Arnold Vander Nat on the other, provide differing arguments about dualism. Swinburne’s ‘Dualism Intact’ argues that a soul is capable of existing without a body while ‘Surviving Souls’ by Paul Moser and Arnold Vander Nat rejects the notion. This paper will analyse the two articles and a rival argument then show why the writer supports the argument presented by ‘Surviving Souls’ Swinburne defends his notion of substance dualism through his model of disembodied consciousness. His works try to prove that humans, as conscious beings, have immaterial souls which, being substances, can survive even when the physical body is destroyed. According to him, when a person’s left and right hemispheres are transferred into different bodies, at least one new person is created. Then, he opines that there could be differing views about the resultant person, but they could all be wrong. That forms the foundation of his argument since, as he says, much might be known as to what happens to a person’s body parts, but it is not known for certain what would happen to the person. The two hemispheres of a person’s brain may be transplanted into separate bodies, and that person survives as one body controlled partly by two different hemispheres from different persons. From this observation, Swinburne provides that there are two new people created, with the possibility of an association with only the left hemisphere, which he terms as Personal Identity (Swinburne 70-74). For clarity, this paper will number the points presented by the idea of personal identity. (1) His notion of personal identity explains that is possible for a person to continue existing logically without the body or any of its parts such as the brain. (2) Because of point (1), a person must already possess some non-bodily constituent, whose persistence is that person’s persistence. (3) Finally, because of (2), a person must have a mental substance, a non-bodily mind. However, these sentiments are not really accurate or cannot be proved. When one analyzes these claims, they attract some objection because of the certainty and authority they seem to bear. For those who do not yet agree with the concept of substance dualism, it would be difficult to go beyond Swinburne’s first provision of personal identity. Further analysis will reveal that all that his argument needed was the basis that it is possible for a person to exist without a body. However, Swinburne further makes an attempt to prove that his assertion by taking on a stronger and more complex claim that it is possible for a person to perceive even without a body. He attempts to explain the relationship between a person and his body in virtue of which it can be said that a particular body belongs to a particular person. He then adds to this claim that it is possible for the person to continue existing even when the relationship between him and his body no longer holds; that is, when the person does not have a body at all. On the other hand, in ‘Surviving Souls’, Paul Moser and Arnold Vander Nat find a lot of ambiguity in Swinburne’s assertions. Although they do not expressly refute the possibility of humans having substantial immaterial souls, they find fault with the Cartesian argument presented by Swinburne. They point out that when Swinburne refers to himself as “some part of me”, he implies that what survives of him as a thing or substance must be a part of that thing or substance, rather than an event (Moser and Vander Nat 101-103). According to them, this position is not clear as to whether Swinburne, then, is a conscious substance and not Humean package of empirical events. The Humean Theory suggests that all reason has to be explained by a psychological state of an agent; an agent of whom they are reasons for example, desire. Observing that Swinburne’s assertions are strongly anti-Humean, this is a significant point from ‘Surviving Souls’. This is seen in the fact that Swinburne insists it is him who has experiences and, therefore, his metaphysical principle states that part of him must survive. Paul Moser and Arnold Vander Nat also note that the arguments presented by Swinburne are deliberately concerned with the existence of souls, and not Strawsonian persons, for a specific purpose. In his provisions for Strawsonian physicalism, Galen Strawson argues that most people who consider themselves materialists or physicalists mistakenly commit themselves the thesis that physical matter is absolutely non-experiential in its elementary nature. He adds that even when such persons are prepared to admit that physical matter has a nature that is capable of manifesting as mental activity, they still commit to the thesis of physical matter. In this sense, Paul Moser and Arnold Vander Nat note that Swinburne’s arguments are geared towards settling the issue whether humans have features of the kind required for God to raise them from the dead in future (Moser and Vander Nat 104). This idea exposes his worry that if humans have nothing to them beyond their bodies and the bodies are destroyed, not even an omnipotent God would have the ability to restore them to life. The two writers argue that the argument presented by Swinburne does not aim at establishing that human souls are immortal in nature and can function naturally forever. Instead, his arguments are inclined towards the concept that allows the revival of human souls by and Omnipotent God even after their bodies are destroyed. Paul Moser and Arnold Vander Nat provide that even without considering theological concerns, the subject of whether humans are immaterial souls is of considerable significance in psychology and philosophy (Moser and Vander Nat 104). According to them, Swinburne’s apparently strong points are self-defeating. That is because they directly refute any psychological or philosophical account of people who are not compatible with dualism and particularly those who do not agree that substantial immaterial souls are in existence. This offers strong supporting principle to my stand that indeed the soul cannot exist without the body. From the analyses of the two articles, it is clear that Swinburne is a supporter of dualism in the sense it was explained by Descartes. Descartes proposed that the mind has no extension in space and, similarly, material is not capable of thinking (Swinburne 68-72). From the arguments presented in “Dualism Intact” and “Surviving Souls”, I agree with the writers of “Surviving Souls” in arguing against Swinburne’s proposals. In particular, I also find fault in his model of disembodied consciousness. First of all, my opinion is that if a person is disembodied and perceives his environment, no other person would know what is transpiring apart from that person himself. Then, since the person would not be physical or material, no other person can detect him. In this perspective, should disembodied perception be detectable in any manner, it would have to be by the person that such perception is supposedly happening to. However, this does not seem to be possible. Taking the human sense of sight as an example, which will then be linked to Swinburne’s case, suppose that a person is in a garage. The notion that that person sees his environment is a presupposition that he has a location from which to do the seeing. In the garage, he will see a car but not the bed in the bedroom since the bed is outside of his visual range. So, if he is in the garage and has visual experiences as those of seeing the car, then maybe he really is seeing the car. However, if he is in the garage and has visual experiences as those of seeing the bed, then he is not really seeing the bed but hallucinating or having a misperception as the bed of another object in the garage. This contrasts the theory presented, and supported by Descartes and Swinburne. In conclusion, in order for an individual to have a distinction within his experience between actually seeing on one side and having hallucinations on the other, he must occupy a determinate place in space. Considering a perceiver who is normally embodied, his position is given by his body’s position in space. If his body is in the garage, what he actually can see is restricted to what is visible within the garage. The significance of this example to Swinburne’s case is that if the experiences of the supposedly disembodied perceiver are all hallucinations, there will not be any cause to think that that perceiver’s location is in his other body (Moser and Vander Nat 105-106). This is because, although he cannot see the bed unless it is within his visual scope, he is clearly hallucinating. Therefore, the experiences of the person who is supposedly disembodied do not grant any other person the reason to claim that he is located outside his other body. Works Cited Moser, P., and Vander Nat, A. Surviving Souls. Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 23.1 (1993): 101-106. Print. Swinburne, R. Dualism Intact. Faith and Philosophy, 13.1 (1996): 68-77. Print. Read More